If No prevails, reserve your harshest judgment for the Coalition

It’s no secret Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is a person for whom the words truth and integrity are of little to no importance. Where dwells political self-interest and opportunism, there goes Dutton. Such traits stand in the space vacated by his moral compass, guiding his every move and every word, making him instinctively impervious to the clanging gongs of criticism. 

These observations are hardly laden with insight, as any cursory glance at Dutton’s grim ministerial record would attest. But they bear raising if only to dispel the regnant line of thinking that because, historically, the success of a referendum ordinarily requires bipartisanship, we must take it as a given that the Voice campaign was doomed from its inception. 

One difficulty with this narrative lies in its self-exculpatory connotations. Any whisper of inevitability framed in these terms allows the reader to sweep and hide from view broader causes for the outcome. “Nothing to see here, move along now”, so the argument will run, leaving intact the comforting tableaux of righteous innocence that figures so strongly in our national conscience. 

Yet if we dared journey through the looking glass, among the causes — perhaps the overriding cause — for a No victory, assuming it comes to pass, would be Dutton and the cavalcade of nodding, solipsistic spivs that pass for much of the Coalition and its former members. 

It’s not so much that Dutton and co decided to withhold bipartisan support for the Voice. It’s that they did so on such utterly dishonest and dangerous terms, choosing to actively campaign against it by trapping so many voters in a wilderness of lies and deceit marked by Trumpian attacks on our basal institutions — the courts, the AEC, and, not least, government itself among them.  

In such circumstances, it cannot plausibly excite any wonder or surprise that Dutton’s conscious decision to torch the very conditions on which democracy relies — a commitment to shared acceptance of facts and truth — has had its desired effect. The clouds of thick black smoke left in its wake have, by design, seen the country live not up to its stated ideas of fairness and equity but dissolve into a belittling cosmos of dank confusion and distrust, forcing the modest and unifying proposal that is the Voice on a death march to oblivion. 

It bears emphasising here that Dutton belongs to a side of politics that has, time after time, indefensibly shunned the basic dignity extended by invitations to heal and walk side-by-side with Indigenous peoples. A side of politics that has instead repeatedly voiced its preference to dehumanise and treat Indigenous peoples as a canvas upon which they can forever project all their warped anxieties, fear and hate. 

This is why it’s probably neither fair nor accurate to suggest the outcome of the Voice rests entirely or ultimately with voters. Insisting otherwise undercuts the sheer wrecking power of lies and pandering in a civic space that has become festooned in squalor and decay, courtesy of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era and the Howard government before it. It also ignores or downplays the ways in which the distrust and democratic malaise that flows from this find ready amplification across social media and, not least, in a concentrated media landscape wholly unperturbed by, or seemingly ill-equipped to deal with, a post-truth world. 

The point is it’s hardly surprising that support for the Voice started to crack and crumble precisely when the No campaign intensified its fusillade of lies and appeals to racism in all its ugly permutations. And it’s hardly surprising that Dutton, who has proved himself utterly fixated with power and unequal to the demands of leadership, so readily embraced this goblet of deceit.

After all, and as the lowest points of the No campaign show with disturbing precision, it wouldn’t matter to Dutton if his pursuit of power required a mind-bending pilgrimage to the gates of hell. There you would find him, knee-deep in chthonic mud, wearing the same flawlessly vacant expression, eyes narrowed on the elusive prospect of power — whatever it takes.

And so, as Niki Savva pointed out this week, it was probably always eminently predictable the Voice campaign would falter and (likely) fail, but not for the simple reason alone that the proposal lacked bipartisanship support. 

The tragedy for the country is that a No vote is not, as the No camp would have us believe, a neutral vote, much less a victory for the status quo. For one thing, should the Albanese government feel, as it’s indicated, that it would lack a mandate to legislate the Voice, what lies in wait are all the same ingrained cycles of injustice and disadvantage that flow from policy mistakes arrived at without First Nations’ consultation.  

More ominously still, the No camp’s racist rhetoric, and the burgeoning campaign to unwind recognition of Indigenous disadvantage it’s inspired on the right, portends a dark return to assimilationist thinking if and when the Coalition is returned to power. The fear here, Professor Marcia Langton has noted, is the Coalition will use a No vote as a catalyst through which to punish Indigenous communities and roll back investment in Closing the Gap. 

For the broader community, there are also consequences, chief among them the grim spectacle that flows from a destroyed civic allegiance to, or lost faith in, the idea of truth as the basic organising principle of democracy. 

We need only look to the twin experiences of the United States and post-Brexit Britain to understand how quickly the fabric of society can unravel in an environment where norm-torching is pressed into a new natural order of things. What’s ultimately left is a country with all the hallmarks of democracy, but an absence of the conditions to sustain it. 

Many, of course, have made the point that the Voice referendum is our Brexit moment, which is both true and not true. True, so far as Brexiteers, like the No camp here, ran a decidedly dishonest campaign. True also, to the extent that the unconcealed missions of personal aggrandisement of some, such as Boris Johnson, correspond with those of Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

And true again, to the extent that some Brexiteers, like the Howards and Abbotts here, couched their position in appeals to a false nostalgia — though note the subtle difference in framing between a pledge to “Make Britain Great Again” and the sentiment expressed in the No position: Australia already is great. 

But where Brexit and the No camp differ is that Brexiteers, however dishonestly, still at least offered hope, however deformed and twisted it might have been, to those whose votes they ultimately secured. Here, by contrast, and not counting the progressive No case, there is simply no defensible or rational basis upon which to vote No. 

In such circumstances, the international ignominy carried by a No vote will inevitably be acute, outweighing that levelled on Britain. And the buyers’ remorse that will shadow this humiliation will be rendered worse for the very reason that unlike those in Britain, the situation we find ourselves in lacks any element of surprise.  

But in the end, our deepest concerns, if the No case prevails, should lie with First Nations peoples. Nine months ago, on (what we still refer to as) Australia Day, I had the privilege of speaking with Aunty Pat Anderson, who told me of her tears when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a referendum on election night. “We all cried, we were all on the phone, crying.” 

When I asked why, she said: “Because we’ve never had that kind of support before. This land, this beautiful continent, is ancient. She’s like an old lady, all her teeth worn down, and you have to treat her gently, and we’ve been looking after this continent for tens of thousands of years. We used to say, ‘if we’re sick, then the nation is sick’, and I think that’s true.”

It’s truly difficult to conceive of a more accurate and depressing self-portrait of Australia if, as we all suspect, the Yes campaign is defeated on Saturday. And one which will forever cast Dutton in the ugly light he deserves.